


Daisy Daisy

by RosettaLoreta



Category: The Hateful Eight (2015)
Genre: Hateful Eight, Multi, Prequel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-06
Updated: 2016-06-06
Packaged: 2018-07-12 16:30:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7113526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RosettaLoreta/pseuds/RosettaLoreta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daisy Daisy is a  prequel to the Hateful Eight which tells of the complex and cosmopolitan adventures of Jody and Daisy Domergue from the late 1830s - (Daisy being born December 24 1838)  to c 1877 [i.e. 12 years after the Civil War]. In this universe the moral certainties of the film are revealed to be inverted. Jody and Daisy are not working class criminals, but Baudelairean epicureans, apart from their long and devoted love for each other, one of their key aims in life is to restore their former fortune and privilege, lost during the Civil War</p>
<p>BTW - they often refer to themselves as Le Prince Jordaine and La Princesse Marguerite de Domergues. Whether they actually have the right to claim this title is another matter ...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Daisy Daisy

**Author's Note:**

> Daisy Daisy is a prequel to the Hateful Eight which tells of the complex and cosmopolitan adventures of Jody and Daisy Domergue from the late 1830s - (Daisy being born December 24 1838) to c 1877 [i.e. 12 years after the Civil War]. In this universe the moral certainties of the film are revealed to be inverted. Jody and Daisy are not working class criminals, but Baudelairean epicureans, apart from their long and devoted love for each other, one of their key aims in life is to restore their former fortune and privilege, lost during the Civil War. 
> 
> BTW - they often refer to themselves as Le Prince Jordaine and La Princesse Marguerite de Domergues. Whether they actually have the right to claim this title is another matter ...
> 
> Those we may think of as the heroes of the film are revealed as evil and hypocritical.
> 
>  
> 
> I also take my cue from the first draft of the script where Jody is older than Daisy, but he is the youthful, gracious and suave Jody of the filmed version. He is about five or six years older than Daisy however  
>  
> 
> It exists in scattered fragments, whether it may ever be completed or consolidated will be up to work commitments and other writing projects. The whole story is known, but some of the details are not - such as whether in fact magic is enabled. Even whether my heroine in telling her story is alive, dead, or soon to die is not known ... Certainly if those who sought to kill her are not dead, they will be soon as she will be avenged and not by 15 ruffians either 
> 
>  
> 
> The title comes from an old Victorian song, which made a facetious reference to Daisy Greville, one of the many mistresses of King Edward VII, who himself certainly knew Daisy and Jody
> 
> This is a section from within Daisy's opening meditation - the tale is mostly told in first person

**Daisy Daisy**

 

_"Personally, I think that the unique and supreme delight lies in the certainty of doing 'evil'–and men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil."_

_"But what can eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight??"_  
Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1821-1867) 

 

Hanging …

May be it is Karma like they say in Tibet or it is China or Timbuctoo, or is it our redskins or the niggers or just us white crackers, we all say it in some way or another that what goes around comes around, the bad that you do finally catches up with you.

But I would argue that all I did was just retribution not bad deeds, thus no karma, nothing deserved about all that I have been through in the last few days, dragged on a chain by a feeble minded braggart from New York to Wyoming.

Well the Yankees hanged my white Persian cats in the garden, all four of them, all in little tiny cat sized nooses. They even bothered to make cat sized nooses for my cats, some made from the curtains and portieres. They hanged my cats by the neck until they were dead, there in the shrubbery, but they took away their baskets and their beds, along with the other things in Grandmere’s house, dining tables, sofas, the vases and the chandeliers. That made no sense to me, why have cat beds without no cats?

Then what did they do with that stuff that they took? Burn it in their nightly campfires? There was a limit to the amount of carpets you could line an officer’s tent with and the amount of dining chairs and parlour furniture that could be set in a circle under a tent fly and that joke sort of wore thin, once seen, much the same as those paintings with Prussian officers in muddy boots encamped in flowery boudoirs during the invasion of France half a decade later. Our fellow Southerners, those that lived, were as poor as hell and surely would not buy their neighbours’ things from passing bummers, given that the same said bummers had already removed whatever valuables that our neighbours had to pay or barter with. Perhaps they sent them up north and someone’s moggy sleeps in one of my cat beds still. And let me say those cat beds were the talk of several counties, not only back in Louisiana where Maman and us children lived, down among the Domergues, but in Georgia where we moved to be with grandmother and for our protection from Beast Butler, with Jody away fighting, now Maman was a wonderful woman, but she made one hell of a mistake, without which this story would not be such as it is, and I would not be wondering what death would get me, freezing, bullets and blood loss or choking by courtesy of two trashy jerks - to keep me out of the harm and insults of Butler’s men, she moved straight into the future path of Sherman’s men. No sense there, but then she did not predict that that pigdog, _ach sicher ein Schweinhund_ – you did know I could speak German did you? Not as well as did Jody, but it could get me through, though picking it up partly from Prince Friedrich Karl gave it a somewhat crude and masculine inflection - would crawl out of the swamp.

Even as we travelled all eyes were drawn to them cat beds and the fancy baskets in which my cats travelled. Oh those beds, all carved wood, with silk curtains and tassels, one even like a little Chinese temple. For I had heard that cats came from China, no matter, and demanded a temple for my cats. Throughout my life I have always delighted in having definite ideas, wild mad ideas, and when my fortunes were up, being able to totally indulge them. Maman was like that too, and until the moment of her death, she was a woman who was totally in control of her fate and her fortune. And when I say fortune, I mean it in both the monetary and the mystic sense, for she had both a plenty until they ran out at the moment of her death.

But as we travelled there was never a shortage of men willing to help carry the baskets and the cats and their beds. Half the Confederate army that should have been fighting the Yankees were told off to carry my cats by their officers. As we travelled we met some eminent men and heroes and Maman had after an interview, during which, let me say, sometimes the entourage had more eyes for the daughter than the mother, even though those officers at times could be mighty interested in Maman. We carried with us all manner of letters of recommendation and safe passage, asking the bearer to afford us all assistance and comfort in our travels. I now wonder whether the government in Richmond thought that as Maman and Grandmother had English relations we could assist in bringing England in to support us in the war. I would be lying if I did not admit that there was once or twice an occasion where Maman and some high ranking officer needed to discuss the content of those letters of recommendation, all private-like. Maman was a broad-minded and highly progressive woman and she practiced what she preached when she told medical men to wash their mouths out with soap if they even insinuated that there were operations and surgical procedures that could cure me of my peculiar and embarrassing symptoms and make me the sort of girl who would be content to sit indoors all day, embroidering monograms on her trousseau or writing out recipes, who would not shout back at any beau or future husband. Officers who would ride up and demand that we surrendered our carriage horses or even our coachman for the war effort, would read those letters, and there would be a detachment of men bringing fresh straw for the cat baskets and cleaning out the old. There may have been shortages in the old Confederacy, but my cats sure as hell never had to suffer them. The only people who showed them cruelty were the Yankees.

But sometimes, just sometimes, those letters did not work, various military men would invoke their power to stop our journey or confiscate our goods, vehicles, horses or food in the name of the war and Maman would have to play some special cards, she generally opened with a low value ambit, see our coloured girls, she would lend them one or two of them, if they so wished, sometimes they did so wish, and we either waited whilst the business was done or they would take the girls away and bring them back half a day or so later, but sometimes the officers laughed, they could already have any coloured girl for the taking, and then Maman would weep, but between her sobs, would play a more high value card, she was forced to admit that her daughter was not a pure woman, in an excess of patriotic emotion, she gave that which should have been kept for a future husband, to a departing hero who perished on the field, before he could come back home make good that gift, and that terrible war, indeed all of daisy’s many fiancés had gone off, departed to defend the beloved Southland and home and hearth with a certain farewell gift but equally all had died on the field of honour before Daisy herself could be made an honest woman of, Daisy was a good girl, attentive, considerate, but her nerves needed calming from time to time. Something alas that no Maman could ever do. Once Maman began to weep, then it seemed likely that I would be called over, and Maman would say that these officers wanted to go out walking with me. Often it was a simple direct transaction, we would retreat to some bushes beside the road, someone would bring a grey army blanket from a saddle roll, and I would take the precaution of removing my blockade sourced dress and hanging it nearby on a tree. Other times if it were in a city, they would take me off to another hotel to that in which we were all staying, and had the luxury of a large double bed and once, yes once, they put me on a horse, and I rode off with them, having taken off my hoops, as we all wore without question in those days and tied them to the pommel, to a large army encampment, where I stayed for three days, and was treated very well, plenty of food, baths, proper beds, certainly I was passed around a bit, but only to men of commissioned rank. Yet it was a fascinating place, to have seen it up close, a city of men, and canvas and something dawned on me … 

But the cats’ karma would fall on the Yankees not on me

Well the Yankees hanged my white Persian cats in the garden, all four of them, all in little tiny cat sized nooses, like I did my dolls and the neighbours’ dolls. The mothers of the county all complained to Maman, who simply wrote away to New Orleans, or Philadelphia or New York for more splendid, larger and more sumptuously attired dolls which were despatched to my mourning friends or more truly ex-friends as children across the county were known to vociferously beg their own Mamas not to invite the Domergues to tea or to any celebration. Still I wondered why adults built houses with grand stair cases, and galleries and even musician’s balconies and fine balustrading sometimes in intricate cast iron swirls and garlands that all just simply invited a mass execution of dolls, swinging in the void, and then complained when that happened. But the dolls never mattered, they never got broke, unless one slipped out of her noose, as their necks could hold firm, they never cared because unlike me, they could be back again tomorrow unharmed to do the same thing again. Now I am a real girl, I aint so resilient and you just don’t go to the dolls hospital to get you some new teeth, But they are the least of my worries … though the thoughts of gutta percha, porcelain and of course Paris where they make everything so much better than anywhere else in the world … do keep creeping in my mind. Now burning dolls at the stake if we were playing Joan of Arc, that did affect the dolls. Jody would challenge me not to cry as he put my dolls to the pyre, if I did cry surely my face would run and streak like the dolls’ wax before our eyes. The dolls’ faces would streak and run in little moist trails as if they were crying, he would laugh watch the way their tulle ball gowns explode all at once into flame, isn’t the death of a doll or two worth that sight?

I don’t think it was the dolls’ karma that brought me here.

No it was a big tree in Georgia, not too far from where Grandmere’s house once stood.

Lots of dark boys in two shades of blue, midnight and sky, kicking and rasping, and a couple of white boys in blue for good measure too.

Lots of boys in grey below them laughing and one particular little boy in grey, smooth and beardless, perhaps a musician from his size and possible youth, a messenger being hugged and congratulated by the others, they called him honey and asked him repeatedly if don’t look good and mighty pleasing to you  
And the white officer calling out before they dragged him off his feet

“Little lady you tell ‘em, I did nothing to you, I did n’t touch you the black major wouldn’t let us”

“you did nothing to stop it”


End file.
